If you’re an Android user and you wish you had iMessage on your device, you’ll be happy to hear about there is a solution that effectively brings iMessage onto an Android device. It’s called WeMessage, and it’s a third party effort that uses an interesting workaround to gain iMessage on Android devices.

But there is a catch; you must have a Mac, along with an Android device of course. The Mac is necessary because weMessage works by essentially using a Mac as a software relay point, which then passes the messages along to the Android device and accompanying Android app, and vice versa. This is achieved by running a weMessage server app on the Mac, which allows the client weMessage Android app to send and receive iMessages.

Whether or not you trust a third party service to relay your messages is up to you, but if you absolutely must have iMessage sending capabilities on an Android phone or tablet then this may be a reasonable solution.

Note this approach is different from using iMessage on a Windows PC by screen sharing, though you could certainly replicate that approach on Android too with a VNC client as well if desired, which would circumvent the need to use a third party service to relay any messages. Use either, or neither, that’s up to you as well.

If this sounds appealing or interesting to you, you can download the client app as well as the server from the developer website:

Note you’ll also need to get Java on the Mac, and enable some specific accessibility features that allow weMessage to run as expected.

The developer created a helpful walkthrough video on how to get iMessage working on Android by way of WeMessage and weServer, you can watch that below:

And if you just want a little overview video demonstrating the WeMessage app in action to send and receive iMessages on Android, the developer created one of those too:

WeMessage is a tricky solution that offers Android access to imessage, but it apparently works fine – for now anyway – though it wouldn’t be too surprising if it were shut down at some point.

As for an official iMessage for Android app coming from Apple, that seems unlikely, as Apple seems to prefer keeping the iMessage platform restricted to Apple devices, but who knows, maybe it will happen?